‘Coffee? What the devil is this? I thought the agreement was when you finally consented for Gavin to buy that horse that he would neither ask for nor even accept a spoonful of coffee until he was eighteen years old:’ and his mother not even listening, with the same hand and in the same manner half shoving and half popping the cream pitcher then the sugar bowl into his reach and already turning back toward the kitchen, her voice not really hurried and impatient: just brisk:
‘Drink it now. We’re already late:’ and now they looked at her for the first time: dressed, even to her hat, with in the crook of her other arm the straw basket out of which she had darned his and his father’s and his uncle’s socks and stockings ever since he could remember, though his uncle at first saw only the hat and for a moment seemed to join him in the same horrified surprise he had felt in the bathroom.
‘Maggie!’ his uncle said. ‘You cant! Charley——’
‘I dont intend to,’ his mother said, not even stopping. ‘This time you men will have to do the digging. I’m going to the jail:’ already in the kitchen now and only her voice coming back: ‘I’m not going to let Miss Habersham sit there by herself with the whole county gawking at her. As soon as I help Paralee plan dinner we’ll——’ but not dying fading: ceasing, quitting: since she had dismissed them though his father still tried once more:
‘He’s got to go to school.’
But even his uncle didn’t listen. ‘You can drive Miss Eunice’s truck, cant you?’ his uncle said. ‘There wont be a Negro school today for Aleck Sander to be going to so he can leave it at the jail. And even if there was I doubt if Paralee’s going to let him cross the front yard inside the next week.’ Then his uncle seemed even to have heard his father or at least decided to answer him: ‘Nor any white school either for that matter if this boy hadn’t listened to Lucas, which I wouldn’t, and to Miss Habersham, which I didn’t. Well?’ his uncle said. ‘Can you stay awake that long? You can get a nap once we are on the road.’
‘Yes sir,’ he said. So he drank the coffee which the soap and water and hard toweling had unfogged him enough to know he didn’t like and didn’t want but not enough for him to choose what simple thing to do about it: that is not drink it: tasting sipping then adding more sugar to it until each—coffee and sugar—ceased to be either and became a sickish quinine sweet amalgam of the worst of both until his uncle said,
‘Dammit, stop that,’ and got up and went to the kitchen and returned with a saucepan of heated milk and a soup bowl and dumped the coffee into the bowl and poured the hot milk into it and said, ‘Go on. Forget about it. Just drink it.’ So he did, from the bowl in both hands like water from a gourd, hardly tasting it and still his father flung a little back in his chair looking at him and talking, asking him just how scared Aleck Sander was and if he wasn’t even scareder than Aleck Sander only his vanity wouldn’t allow him to show it before a darky and to tell the truth now, neither of them would have touched the grave in the dark even enough to lift the flowers off of it if Miss Habersham hadn’t driven them at it: his uncle interrupting:
‘Aleck Sander even told you then that the grave had already been disturbed by someone in a hurry, didn’t he?’
‘Yes sir,’ he said and his uncle said:
‘Do you know what I’m thinking now?’
‘No sir,’ he said.
‘I’m being glad Aleck Sander couldn’t completely penetrate darkness and call out the name of the man who came down the hill carrying something in front of him on the mule.’ And he remembered that: the three of them all thinking it but not one of them saying it: just standing invisible to one another above the pit’s invisible inky yawn.
‘Fill it up,’ Miss Habersham said. They did, the (five times now) loosened dirt going down much faster than it came up though it seemed forever in the thin starlight filled with the constant sound of the windless pines like one vast abateless hum not of amazement but of attention, watching, curiosity; amoral, detached, not involved and missing nothing. ‘Put the flowers back,’ Miss Habersham said.
‘It’ll take time,’ he said.
‘Put them back,’ Miss Habersham said. So they did.
‘I’ll get the horse,’ he said. ‘You and Aleck Sander——’
‘We’ll all go,’ Miss Habersham said. So they gathered up the tools and the rope (nor did they use the flashlight again) and Aleck Sander said ‘Wait’ and found by touch the board he had used for a shovel and carried that until he could push it back under the church and he untied Highboy and held the stirrup but Miss Habersham said, ‘No. We’ll lead him. Aleck Sander can walk exactly behind me and you walk exactly behind Aleck Sander and lead the horse.’
‘We could go faster——’ he said again and they couldn’t see her face: only the thin straight shape, the shadow, the hat which on anyone else wouldn’t even have looked like a hat but on her as on his grandmother looked exactly right, like exactly nothing else, her voice not loud, not much louder than breathing, as if she were not even moving her lips, not to anyone, just murmuring:
‘It’s the best I know to do. I dont know anything else to do.’
‘Maybe we all ought to walk in the middle,’ he said, loud, too loud, twice louder than he had intended or even thought; it should carry for miles especially over a whole countryside already hopelessly waked and alerted by the sleepless sibilant what Paralee probably and old Ephraim certainly and Lucas too would call ‘miration’ of the pines. She was looking at him now. He could feel it.
‘I’ll never be able to explain to your mother but Aleck Sander hasn’t got any business here at all,’ she said. ‘Youall walk exactly behind me and let the horse come last:’ and turned and went on though what good that would do he didn’t know because in his understanding the very word ‘ambush’ meant ‘from the flank, the side’: back in single file that way down the hill to where Aleck Sander had driven the truck into the bushes: and he thought If I were him this is where it would be and so did she; she said, ‘Wait.’
‘How can you keep on standing in front of us if we dont stay together?’ he said. And this time she didn’t even say This is all I can think of to do but just stood there so that Aleck Sander walked past her and on into the bushes and started the truck and backed it out and swung it to point down the hill, the engine running but no lights yet and she said, ‘Tie the reins up and let him go. Wont he come home?’
‘I hope so,’ he said. He got up.
‘Then tie him to a tree,’ she said. ‘We will come back and get him as soon as we have seen your uncle and Mr Hampton——’
‘Then we can all watch him ride down the road with maybe a horse or the mule in front of him too,’ Aleck Sander said. He raced the engine then let it idle again. ‘Come on, get in. He’s either here watching us or he aint and if he aint we’re all right and if he is he’s done waited too late now when he let us get back to the truck.’
‘Then you ride right behind the truck,’ she said. ‘We’ll go slow——’
‘Nome,’ Aleck Sander said; he leaned out. ‘Get started; we’re going to have to wait for you anyway when we get to town.’
So—he needed no urging—he let Highboy down the hill, only holding his head up; the truck’s lights came on and it moved and once on the flat even in the short space to the highroad Highboy was already trying to run but he checked him back and up onto the highroad, the lights of the truck fanning up and out as it came down onto the flat then he slacked the curb, Highboy beginning to run, clashing the snaffle as always, thinking as always that one more champing regurg would get it forward enough to get his teeth on it, running now when the truck lights swung up onto the highroad too, his feet in eight hollow beats on the bridge and he leaned into the dark hard wind and let him go, the truck lights not even in sight during the full half-mile until he slowed him into the long reaching hard road-gait and almost a mile then before the truck overtook and then passed and the ruby tail-lamp drew on and away and then was gone but at least he was out of the pines, free of that looming down-watching sibilance uncaring and missing nothing saying to the whole circumambience: Look. Look: but
